Sometimes I wish I were a male hipster

If I were a male hipster

my leg would outgrow my pant

my arm would outgrow my sleeve

and I'd say, “No, sorry, can't

go out with you today,

doing too many relevant things.”

You know, sampling craft beers,

sanitizing my eyebrow rings,

that sort of thing. Meanwhile,

I'd ponder the meaning of life,

make a soundtrack to give it some

with a sampling here of the fife.

I really wish I were a male hipster

when I see one, slender and tall,

a well-sweatered Willow-ent, look of

disdain projecting an impassable wall.

I want his removal, his distance

from all the shit.

Rent, work, food, money,

worry, worry, man, shit,

for a day, I want to tower above,

not see, not care. No, not for a day--

a year, ten years, twenty--

if I became a male hipster, how much would it pay?

NOTES:

I don't want to explain how I came to write this poem and what it means to me. To do so might detract from your experience of the poem and what it means to you, if anything. I don't think poetry, or any good writing, really, needs an explanation from the author. If I tell you how I came at it, or why I started writing it, you will view it differently. I want you to take away your own unique experience of this poem and any other poetry I post.

That said, I still want to qualify for the HubPages Patron of the Arts contest, so I will include some general information about hipsters, including what I just learned about hipsters in the 1940s and 1950s. Yeah, I didn't know there were hipsters then either. The things we learn from our fathers.

Apparently the word hipster was coined in the 1940s to talk about young white people who liked black jazz music in the '40s. Of course, it was more than just the music. It was a whole lifestyle of middle-class white people wanting to escape or transcend their middle-class existence. I'm getting this information from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipster_%28contemporary_subculture%29, where other people have checked on other more reliable sources (I hope).

No one seems to know exactly what a hipster of today is. Is it someone who dresses in a deliberately and stylishly scruffy way? Or is it something more than that? Is it still about transcendence? How do you define hipster? If you consider yourself a hipster, is there something more to it than that? But then, I don't think hipsters really consider themselves hipsters. If they did, they would lose something of the essence that makes them hipsters. What an enigma.

I hope this Hub still qualifies for the Patron of the Arts contest, but more importantly, I hope you got something out of it. Maybe just entertainment, maybe something more. In the comments, I would be happy to see a discussion of whether or not you think poetry is improved by having an explanation. I know I don't like to read explanations of poems. What's your take on it?